North Carolina's lawmakers take information out of the public's hands one of three ways. Often it's on purpose, such as when legislators gave public hospitals the right last year to keep most employees' pay confidential. The state doesn't typically do that for public employees, but the rationale was to put competing public and private hospitals under the same rules.

Sometimes it happens when vague or confusing legal language gets misinterpreted, which occurred recently in a dispute over whether state pension records were public information.

It took Attorney General Roy Cooper's overriding his staff's legal interpretation to restore the openness that lawmakers said they had intended.

And sometimes lawmakers mean to exempt one kind of information from public disclosure, but changing the law unintentionally conceals other kinds from the public.

That's why, during the worst drought in North Carolina's recorded history, you're not entitled to know who's conserving water and who's not.

The avowedly accidental secrecy of water records in hundreds of towns across the state is a prime example of how the law of unintended consequences sometimes ensnares the public's right to know what the government is up to -- and how hard secrecy is to roll back.

A 2001 change in state law was meant to allow public electric co-operatives to keep their billing accounts private, just like those of competing electric companies.

But the language in the exemption was so broad that it applies to every kind of public utility billing -- including what cities charge businesses and homeowners for water, and how much their customers use of the scarce, essential public resource.

That was a goof, several lawmakers and lobbyists involved in the law's passage say.

"I can absolutely assure you that that was not the intent," said Alice Garland, a state lottery executive who pushed the bill as the electric co-ops' lobbyist then. "Folks weren't thinking about water systems. Water conservation wasn't an issue at the time. Nobody was forward-thinking enough to anticipate that."

Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat who filed the utilities bill, says he wasn't trying to shield water bills.

"That was for ElectriCities only," Rand said last week. "Water was never part of it. Water billing isn't a competitive issue. It should be public, it seems to me."

But now, because of the utility billing law, it's not.

Mayor: Sunshine, please

In drought-ravaged Raleigh, for example, city officials have cited the utility law in refusing to release the water records of its biggest customers -- including Pepsi, which bottles treated city water as Aquafina.

And Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker says it's hard to debate publicly the city's regulations for carwashes, landscapers and other customers as long their records are confidential.

"The more transparency there is, the better off the public will be, knowing that everybody is trying to conserve," he said.

Raleigh resident Joe Kertis opposes the water secrecy.

"That bothers the heck out of me," said Kertis, 79, a retired Rockwell International manager. "You're supposed to be able to tell what the government's doing. We all need water. I'd like to know who's using it, and what they're paying for it."

Kertis is far from alone.

"I get tons of calls about this," said Raleigh lawyer Amanda Martin, general counsel to the N.C. Press Association. "People are interested in who's using all the water, particularly large companies that are big water users. The water you use is water I can't use."

And there's a larger philosophical point, Martin and other advocates of openness say.

"When the government's in the business of collecting and selling a public resource like water, the public has a right to oversee how it's done," she said.

Bills used to be open

The utility billing law hid from public view information that had been available until 2001.

A 1997 advisory opinion from then-Attorney General Mike Easley's office to Hendersonville's city attorney confirmed what the law had been for decades:

"The billing records of municipal water and sewer services (and other public utilities) are records made and received by government agencies and are, therefore, public records," the official legal opinion said. "Absent a specific statutory exemption, those public records must be made available for public inspection pursuant to the Public Records Law."

Four years later, the N.C. League of Municipalities, which lobbies the legislature for more than 500 cities and towns, neither endorsed nor opposed confidentiality for water bills, said general counsel Andy Romanet.

"We had no policy on it," he said. "I never thought twice about whether it was good or bad."

Romanet did persuade legislative leaders to include exceptions to the new secrecy rule that would allow cities to share utility billing information with bond lawyers and rating agencies.

But no one stood up for the public's interest in access to billing information -- not even the press association, which was preoccupied with other issues, such as ensuring the public's right of access to lawsuit information.

"It was one of countless bills that come through the legislature that do relatively small things but hurt the public's right to know," said John Bussian, a lawyer who lobbies the legislature for the association. "Considering all that was going on then, it wasn't the top priority. This one was triaged. We couldn't divert our limited resources to it."

Public's right to know

Sometimes, though, the legislature corrects its mistakes.

And Rand, for one, says he would like to revisit the water secrecy law this year or next.

"It's the kind of thing that should be changed," Rand said. "There's no reason why things should be confidential unless that serves a public purpose."

Despite that theory, Bussian said, he goes up against a dozen or more secrecy bills every year.

"There's an onslaught of exceptions that come at us, and we're at a loss to deal with them all," he said. "Every bill that limits the public's right of access to public records and meetings hurts the public's right to know what the government is doing in its name."

That's why several of North Carolina's leading First Amendment lawyers are talking about pushing to give the public an overriding right of access to government records and meetings under the state Constitution, as California voters did in 2004.

That could help, they say, by making it harder for state and local government officials to limit public access to information by ordinary statute.

"There will always be someone in favor of an exception," said Mark Prak, a Raleigh media lawyer. "You're going to have to have exceptions. But they should be narrowly circumscribed and periodically flushed. "If you like people buying legislative majorities in restrooms, don't have open government."